TRUST IN A SILENT GOD

There is a certain contrast between the Psalm and today’s Gospel. Psalm 121 tells us of a God who is always ready to protect those who trust in Him… “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand… The Lord will keep you from all evil; He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.”

And yet, when we turn to the Gospel, we find Jesus who seems not to listen to a mother pleading with Him. At first, He does not even answer her; only later, when the disciples ask Him to do something, does He explain the reason for His silence. He responds to the woman only when she throws herself at His feet, when she places herself before Him and does not allow Him to leave without an answer.

This is a Jesus we are not used to in the Gospels. Typically, everyone who begs Him is immediately heard—indeed, Jesus behaves like the God of Psalm 121, protecting from all evil those who trust in Him. This time, no—or rather, not immediately: this mother must plead greatly before she is heard. Yet perhaps all of you can confirm that this is, in fact, the Jesus we often encounter in our prayers, where we must cry out, weep, plead, and repeatedly throw ourselves at His feet before being heard.

The first examples that come to mind, of course, are tragedies, of which every family has its share. Where was God when my mother was dying of cancer? Where was God when my father abused me? Where was God when this or that natural disaster left behind streets filled with corpses?

But we do not need to go to such extremes to ask the same question. There are people who for years—even decades—work like slaves for meager wages, ask for help, and God does not answer for a long time. There are those who live alone for years, begging God to find a wife or a husband, and nothing happens. There are even those who struggle for years against a sin, an addiction, and again God does not seem ready to intervene. Jesus seems to act as He did with the Canaanite woman: to turn His back and move on. We may find comfort in the fact that even the great King David was a veteran of this “struggle with God,” as the beginning of Psalm 13 testifies: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

But the Canaanite woman does not give up. Even when Jesus seems to turn His back on her, even when it seems that her prayers are falling into emptiness, she refuses to believe anything other than what the Psalm tells us: the Lord (Jesus) is the Guardian of those who trust in Him. And so she continues to pray, to plead, to struggle, clinging to nothing but God’s promise. Even when Jesus tells her, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” she persists and admits that the dogs do not eat the children’s bread, it is true—but they at least receive the crumbs that fall from the table. She knows that even a single crumb of Christ’s love and power will free her daughter from the demon, and she will not leave until Christ has blessed her. Jesus does not rebuke her; on the contrary, He praises her faith, grants her request, and sends her home in peace.

The silence of God must not deceive us, dear brothers and sisters, into thinking that God has forgotten us, or worse, that His heart has become indifferent toward us. Jesus Himself will face the silence of the Father when He begs that the cup might pass from Him—and in response He receives the cross. Yet Jesus refused to believe that the Father who was silent had truly forgotten Him, His only-begotten Son, and “entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly,” as Saint Peter says (1 Peter 2:23). The Psalm and today’s Gospel are only in apparent conflict, because in reality, when we encounter the Jesus of the Canaanite woman—the Jesus who does not answer, who seems to turn His face away—the heart must cling in trust to the Jesus of Psalm 121 and “hope against hope” that this is the heart God has revealed to us in His Son.

This does not mean that all our prayers will eventually be granted. Sometimes God answers our prayers by causing the desire for what we asked to fade away. Sometimes He leaves us in the midst of the struggle and wants us to remain in prayer, clinging only to His promise like a rock in a storm. But I almost feel ashamed to give this encouragement, because there is nothing attractive in such suffering. When we remember the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Saints of every age, we recount their hardships in a heroic way… but the truth is that suffering is simply terrible. The truth is that sometimes we suffer in silence, we pray to a heaven that answers with abyssal silence, and no angel or prophet comes to save us. Jesus promises to hear our prayers, but the hard truth—perhaps the harshest law in Scripture—is that sometimes what we ask is less good than what God intends to give us, even when it involves illness, pain, and death. Unfortunately, I cannot always explain this.

Faith, however, learns from the Gospel to know the God who hides behind silence, pain, and disappointment. Faith learns to believe that even when God seems to wage war against us, even when He seems to draw the bow and shoot His arrows at us, in reality He is our Friend, Father, and Guardian. If you wait to discover this from creation, or from the answers to your prayers, you will never see it. When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, it does us no good to admire the warmth of the sun or the colors of the flowers. When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, there is only one thing I can cling to: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God allowed Himself to be hung on a cross for my sake; therefore I refuse to yield to the darkness and the cold, and, “hoping against hope,” I know that God is my friend. Perhaps my prayers will not receive the answer I desire, or not immediately, but I know that each one touches the heart of the Father as if it were the words of Christ Himself.

I remember when, some time ago, I was going through a truly dark period in my life, and despite my prayers, God gave me no answer—in fact, my problems seemed to multiply. One day I was celebrating Mass, and when I knelt to receive Communion, I said to myself: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). It did not make my problems disappear, but it reminded me that at that altar, in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death, Jesus was with me, at my side.

And that God who stands beside us will one day truly deliver us. Sometimes Jesus will say to us: “Great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you desire.” At other times, the answer will be: “Great is your faith! Remain faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” We do the one thing we can do in this world: “to believe that we have a gracious and merciful God because of Jesus Christ” (as our confessions say), and to wait for His deliverance.

Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to conclude with one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 130, which summarizes what we have said:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive to my cry for help.

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,

and in His word I hope.

My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning,

more than watchmen for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord!

For with the Lord there is steadfast love,

and with Him is abundant redemption.

And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.